Tuesday Talk ~ managing expectations: pros, gamers and the puck

Every technology company of any meritmaps out a technological road ahead, garners resources to reach that point, then heads for it. A lot of what’s achievable, of course, depends on what tech is available, ie with Intel CPUs, port tech, bus chips etc.
Apple, perhaps thanks to undue influence allowed to Jonny Ive, staked its future on the Touch Bar – which I agree is much better than a touch screen on a PC – and slimmer and lighter at any cost, but pro users yearned for more RAM (32 GB), more CPU/GPU speed, and a longer battery life, as the Mac Observer’s John Martellero pointed out.
And if you wonder why gaming is so important to computing, gamers want exactly the same things, so both these markets drive computer development, and of the two, gamers is probably the bigger. In the old saw of ‘skate to where the puck will be, not where the puck is’, Apple is now the puck, and the other tech companies – even dinosaurs like HP and Microsoft – have skated past.

Of course, the counter argument runs that Samsung ‘discovered’ the secret to selling smartphones was to copy Apple’s software as closely as possible. Microsoft did the same thing, reckons Daniel Eran Dilger, in reverse: using its own software, it began copying Apple’s hardware business as closely as it could, which I find ironic after the decades of Microsoft aficionados berating me that ‘Apple didn’t know what it was, a software or hardware company’.
(Hah, sucks to be you, now.)

Apple has the resources to build a fully functioning base on the moon, as I’ve said before, and still have the billions upon billions to improve its offerings with. Yet still we wait. A lot can go wrong with the hopes for an iPhone sales comeback starting in late 2017 with iPhone 8, aka the tenth anniversary iPhone. People these days hold onto their existing smartphones for longer (I’m still more than happy with my 6, and there have been several models since then). Meanwhile a higher percentage of people buying iPhones in the US, still Apple’s biggest market, have been opting for older or cheaper models than they did in the past.
Of course, there are 500 to 600 million iPhones out there in the world. If just 4% of those iPhone owners opt for a new model, that translates into at least 20 million new iPhone sales. As Shira Ovide points out, if the iPhone/smartphone has run out of growth, it’s not clear that driverless cars, streaming videos, ‘smart speakers’ or anything else can fully pick up the slack.

But still, Apple – the puck’s going to be somewhere else. Where will you be?

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Mark Webster | Mac NZ

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